Interaction

Fall 2006

Knowledge of archaeology

Courtesy Ian Hodder

Mihriban Ozbarasan, left, is a professor at Istanbul University who leads a group working at the Catalhoyuk site. Ian Hodder, second from left, is director of Stanford's Archaeology Program.

Archaeologists at Stanford used to be all over the place. In trailers. In basements. In their home departments. But never, or hardly ever, near their archaeological colleagues.

Courtesy Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project

But it's a new and exciting era at Stanford. Since 2005, a state-of-the-art Archaeology Center just off

the Main Quad has become a home for faculty, students and visitors, a place for meetings and lab work and artifact storage and the sort of casual conversation that can spark projects that, before, might never have seen the light of day.

First approved in early 2001 and recently renewed for another five years, the interdisciplinary undergraduate Archaeology Program has participating faculty from the departments of Anthropological Sciences, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Classics, Geological and Environmental Sciences, Geophysics, Political Science, History, and Art and Art History. Teaming up, they are training a new generation of scholars and practitioners.

And starting this fall, a workshop at the Humanities Center provides a new intellectual forum on archaeology.

It was the arrival of historian and classicist Ian Morris in 1995 that got this collaborative process going, most people say. There followed a series of senior appointments—including archaeologists Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell—and junior appointments in a range of departments. Suddenly, there were few better places to learn and practice archaeology than at Stanford. The university's mix of new and old, theory and practice, and politics and tradition is unique, scholars say, and absolutely essential for ensuring that archaeology lives up to its literally ground-breaking potential as a field that cuts across and challenges a host of disciplines.

"All these people all working together is very inspiring," said Josh Ober, a new faculty member with a joint appointment in political science and classics. He is the first holder of the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professorship and just arrived here from Princeton. "It's a world that tends to be quite fragmented. The Old World doesn't talk to the New World; dirt doesn't talk to theory. Clearly, at Stanford there's a real eagerness to do things in a way that brings together strengths from various traditions."

Courtesy Ian Hodder

Archaeologists at Catalhoyuk, in central Turkey, have constructed a roof to protect part of the site, which was home to between 5,000 and 10,000 people, making it an unusually large Neolithic settlement. An international team of archaeologists there works under the direction of Ian Hodder.

Hodder, the Dunlevie Family Professor and director of the Archaeology Center, made it clear that this scholarly convergence on the center does not mean he is interested in creating a new department. Archaeology departments, in fact, are a rare breed in the United States.

"The key issue is flexibility," he said. "We need a loose structure, a network, openness. We don't need another straitjacket. Disciplines go back and forth with the times, and we must allow them to move and to change, to incorporate new theories and new technologies."

Hodder spoke just after returning from a summer in Turkey, where he directs the dig at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (http://www.catalhoyuk.com/). "The great strength of Stanford is the availability of international travel in the summer," he said last summer, reflecting on his upcoming duties as director.

"I feel very strongly there's an extreme importance for Stanford students to go abroad. When you're at the site, you sit there. You don't just pass through; you have to interact with the local community. I can see how the students change."

Stanford faculty have ongoing projects on every continent, and every one has the potential to slice through methodological, theoretical, social and moral concerns. "Archaeology tends to be ghettoized in one place or another," Hodder said. Usually that means an anthropology department.

"In the United States, no one has successfully bridged the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences," he said. "We're unable to bring people together, integrate them, build something new. But at Stanford, we have managed to take a diverse range of sciences and pull them together in the center, which is unique."

Hodder is the standard-bearer for a new wave of archaeology called post-processual. In a nutshell,

Courtesy Ian Hodder

Archaeologists clean the floors of an excavated house at Catalhoyuk before they take photographs of the site.

the argument is that archaeology is not an objective science and the past is not removed from the present. Proponents tend to stress the local, the contextual, human agency and the contingent nature of evidence. Archaeologists, in this view, do not offer an exact translation of the past for their contemporaries; rather, they are mediators.

It should come as no surprise that the new archaeologists sometimes find themselves fighting off the charge of relativism. Hodder has no doubts on that score. "I want to encourage two sorts of reflection: regarding the impact on stakeholders, and regarding our own perspective, why we make the claims we do," he said. "But this does not undermine archaeological science, and this is very central to the discussion. The most exciting part about archaeology today is that we're not just throwing labels around. We're really engaging in how to use the sciences in the historical disciplines. People can say we're postmodern, but that in no way is mutually exclusive with scientific research."

The substance of an archaeologist's work is material evidence. "Material practice allows us to see structures and agency," said Barb Voss, a former contract archaeologist (and Stanford graduate) who just finished her first book, which is about gender and ethnicity in the Spanish Presidio of San Francisco. "It's not what people think or say but what they do," she said. "Our lives are embedded in stuff."

Voss, an assistant professor of cultural and social anthropology, is one of the proud advisers of the Archaeology Program's first honors graduate, an anthropology/geology double major who also worked with Gail Mahood, professor of geological and environmental sciences, on a project studying the remains of adobe structures in the Presidio.

Barb Voss

"She was exactly the kind of student we want in the program," Voss said. When Voss herself was an undergraduate here and knew she wanted to be an archaeologist, she had to go from office to office seeking help. "But now, with the program, you can go to CASA [Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology], anthropology, geology, history or classics, and you're one of them. The program gives students the legitimacy to do interdisciplinary work."

"You need a home, a base, a foundation," she added, referring to the fact that most of the program's students choose to double-major, thinking that doing so will increase their options later on. And they need a rigorous disciplinary grounding. "But not a straitjacket," she said, echoing Hodder's words.

"Archaeology is a team sport," Voss said. For that reason it's probably hard to understate the excitement the center has generated.

CASA Professor Lynn Meskell, who spent the summer doing fieldwork in South Africa, said she believes the building that houses the Archaeology Center is a starting point, not an end point. "Stanford has such resources and such a responsibility to do the right thing and set an example," she said. "We don't deserve that building unless we get out and do something."

Upstairs in that building is where Michael Shanks, the Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology, has his lab. Shanks has pushed his field into territories hitherto unsuspected of being archaeological. Performance art, for example, and video gaming, and commercial design, along with beer cans and Corinthian perfume jars. It's all connected, actually: From all that, one can extract ideas about how we envision and recreate the past, and which material objects anchor us there.

"I am proud of being a pioneer in transdisciplinary research and pedagogy," he said one day last

Courtesy Ian Hodder

his Neolithic burial site in Catalhoyuk, in south-central Turkey, holds the remains of a pregnant woman without a skull.

spring at the center, surrounded by computer screens drawing visitors in to layers upon layers of settings—a bit like the layers one might encounter while digging. "Rather than bring methods and approaches to archaeology from other disciplines, I am applying archaeological insight to many different fields and themes."

"The heart of archaeology for me," he said, "is place. This happened here; here are the remains—and collections. It's ironic that in our world there's no discipline of 'things.' There's a cycle of making, using, discarding; there are quarries, workshops, consumers, trade, garbage, the life cycle of artifacts. So we are the discipline of things."

Shanks co-wrote two of the fundamental texts of post-processual archaeology, and his work is considered a crucial reference point for the field. On one of the main tables in his lab, at which a couple of graduate students were working, there were, indeed, piles of things. Searching among them, Chris Witmore, then a graduate student and now a postdoctoral scholar at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, picked up a 400,000-year-old Acheulean hand ax. It had been lying next to an MP3 player, a juxtaposition he found significant.

"Time is chaotic and molten," Witmore observed. "The past has action. There are archaic things all around us."

Ober, a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on campus, remarked that the Archaeology Center "is a genuinely distinctive Stanford institute. It's very much in the forefront of what's going on, which is seeing material culture as part of a larger enterprise of understanding the past and ourselves. It's so much bolder and conceptually broader than the ordinary, much more disciplinary art history approach to archaeology."

Ober, in fact, is an example of how archaeology allows research of the material, the intellectual, the tactile and the theoretical more than most other areas can. The interaction of political thought and culture in ancient Greece is his concern. For example, how did statuary and architecture and numismatics—all physical things that must be dug up—nurture or reflect democratic practice and its ideals?

"I hope I can manage to convince colleagues in political science that the classical world is a testing ground for hypotheses and models of thinking about political structures and economic change, but also that you have to think archaeologically, you have to think about the material side of things," Ober said. "If I can manage to get some aspects of archaeological thought into the realm of contemporary political thought, then I'll have accomplished something."

Shanks said Stanford wanted something different when the program was first proposed. "Our subject is a long-term perspective on humanity. It's not geophysics plus anthropology; it's a big picture on humanity. By definition it's multidisciplinary; no, it's transdisciplinary, it's beyond discipline, it doesn't stay in the spaces between the disciplines. We go beyond that, sometimes a long way," he said.

When outgoing director Ian Morris presented the program to the Faculty Senate for renewal, the presence of the natural sciences in the curriculum appeared to come as good news for faculty members, a guarantee that the program was interdisciplinary. Students are required to study quantitative and scientific methods along with fieldwork, plus the relevant social sciences and humanities courses. The stress on science is one reason why the establishment of the center was so important, Hodder said; archaeologists need their own labs.

Mahood, like Hodder, noted that the number of quantitative and lab techniques that can be applied to archaeology has grown exponentially in recent years. They include DNA testing, radiocarbon dating, starch studies, obsidian analysis and geochemical studies of bones and teeth.

"In a sense, geology is similar to archaeology," said Mahood, who is on the Archaeology Program's advisory committee. "It's rigorous, despite dealing with uncertainty. You have to reach conclusions and feel comfortable with them. I tell my students geology is like real-life decisions. They're based on uncertainty."

The application of geological technology to archaeology is not all that surprising; after all, there is digging involved. But who would have thought, just a few years ago, that a classical archaeologist, a physical anthropologist working on Mesoamerica, a specialist in computer network security, a computational geometer and an expert in computational imaging would all sit on the same dissertation committee?

That was the case, however, in spring 2006, when David Koller, a student of Marc Levoy's, defended his dissertation on "Digitizing Cultural Heritage Objects."

Koller's dissertation had its genesis in the work of classicist Jennifer Trimble, who was at Stanford on a postdoctoral fellowship. Levoy, a professor of computer science and of electrical engineering who previously had digitized statues by Michelangelo, asked if she was interested in looking at images of a remarkable marble map of Rome that had been discovered in the 15th century. The slabs had once been on a wall; they were now in nearly 1,200 pieces, estimated to be just 12 percent of the original. For centuries, scholars had tried to put the map back together again.

Koller had worked on the Digital Michelangelo project, and Levoy recruited him to what would become the Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project. With his dissertation, Koller accomplished two things: He developed algorithms for computer-aided fragmentary reconstruction, and he enabled the secure dissemination of 3-D digital models, thus protecting museums' control over their cultural assets. So not only are computer scientists permitting archaeologists and historians to see an astoundingly detailed vision of Rome, they permit them to gain access to the material, after appropriate security precautions, from anywhere in the world.

"This changes everything," Levoy said someone else remarked when hearing of Koller's work.

Indeed it does. Whether in the case of the broad social context Hodder aims to envelop with his project in Turkey, Shanks' Metamedia project (which allows what he calls "the reactualization of fragments of the past as real-time events") or the Levoy team's work on Rome, the Internet, by opening projects up to a wider public, also provokes us to think about the nature of the evidence and the process by which we and the past act upon each other. Communities, both virtual and not, thus assemble around evidence and set in motion a two-way transformation.

It's a good time for archaeology, not only at Stanford but nationwide, Hodder says. There are lots of contract jobs at development and construction sites. Scientific and technological innovations permit huge advances in the field. And who these days doesn't care about culture—what Hodder calls the "heritage industry"?

Archaeologists, of course, often got their start by excavating the past of peoples colonized or exterminated, and the potentially political dimension of their work escapes no one. This is obviously true in such cases as raiding burial grounds, shipping relics off to European capitals or overlooking the complex social realities of the present-day communities that inhabit the same physical space as their ancestors. But it is also true in the mere act of looking at the past as if it were a theme park, a place one visits, enjoys and then leaves.

Meskell, editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology, is keenly concerned that students learn both to theorize their work and maintain a global perspective. Reflection on agency, cognition, gender, narrative, identity and ethics are among what she and her colleagues believe are the essential tools of an archaeologist today. She wants students to remember that when they study a people whose past was stripped away from them, they are not studying inert relics.

Today in South Africa, she said, ecological conservation, indigenous communities, AIDS and public policy, for example, are well within the domain of an archaeologist.

"If someone had told me I'd be working on biodiversity, I'd have said that's impossible, that's not what archaeologists do," said Meskell, who recently received Mellon Foundation funding for a Stanford-South Africa Heritage Exchange program that includes the participation of Stanford environmental scientists.

"But when you're in the field, you have to engage; you can't predict your level of engagement. It's very exciting. It makes us much more relevant in the world than in years gone by."

Hodder, too, is optimistic about the potential of the major. With more students, more classes, more labs, more overseas opportunities—all of which will come—Stanford will get the program it deserves. "Archaeology is a very self-confident field right now," he said.